2026-08-27
Etsy, eBay, and Shopify listing video limits in 2026 (and why the cap that bites is seconds, not megabytes)
Every upload-limit post in this series so far has been a story about megabytes — Discord's 20MB, Notion's 5MB, Gmail's 25. Marketplace listing videos flip that story on its head. Etsy will happily take a file up to 100MB, but the clip itself may run at most 15 seconds — and Etsy strips the audio on upload. eBay allows 150MB, but wants the video a minute or less, in H.264 specifically. Shopify hosts up to a gigabyte and ten minutes. For once the wall you'll actually hit isn't a byte count, it's a clock — which changes what the right tool is. Here are the numbers from each platform's own documentation, the one case where megabytes do still bite, and how a lossless trim on your own device gets a phone-shot product clip through all three doors.
The numbers, from each platform's own documentation
Etsy's help center keeps its listing-video rules short: the video runs 3–15 seconds, it "will not contain any audio" once uploaded — Etsy removes the soundtrack itself, on their end — and the file should stay under 100MB. (Seller guides updated for 2026 disagree on the minimum — some report Etsy now requires at least 5 seconds — but the ceiling, which is the number that matters here, is 15 seconds in every account.) eBay's help page allows one video per listing, up to 150MB, and says videos "should be one minute or less"; it names the accepted formats precisely — MP4 using "MPEG-4 Part 10 or Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 AVC)", i.e. H.264, plus .mov — caps upload resolution at 1080p, and notes an uploaded video is reviewed before it appears, normally within 48 hours. Shopify's product-media page is the roomy one: video length up to 10 minutes, size up to 1GB, resolution up to 4K, file types .mp4, .mov — or .webm, which Shopify accepts and then, like everything else you upload, converts and serves as MP4 or HLS itself.
Why megabytes almost never bind here — and the one case they do
Run the arithmetic backwards. To hit Etsy's 100MB cap inside Etsy's own 15-second window, a clip would have to sustain about 53Mbps. Almost nothing you'd shoot on a phone runs that hot — with one notable exception. Per the storage estimate printed right on the iPhone's own Camera settings screen, 4K at 60fps in HEVC records about 400MB per minute — which is 6.7MB per second, or almost exactly 100MB per 15 seconds. So a full-length Etsy clip straight off an iPhone at max settings lands right at the cap, and everything shot below 4K/60 fits with room to spare. The same figure explains the other two: a one-minute 4K/60 clip weighs about 400MB, over eBay's 150MB — though eBay's 1080p upload ceiling rules that footage out anyway — and ten minutes of it is about 4GB, four times Shopify's 1GB. The pattern: byte caps only come into play when 4K footage meets a long window. For the ordinary case — a 1080p phone clip trimmed to the length the platform wants — duration is the whole game.
Etsy: fifteen seconds, chosen well, with zero quality loss
A product video's job is detail — the glaze on the mug, the drape of the fabric — which is exactly what a re-encode smears first. That makes Etsy's window the best possible case for NearVid's Trim: it's a lossless stream copy, no re-encode at all, so the 12 seconds you keep are bit-for-bit the quality your camera recorded, and the cut takes well under a second for most files. Load the 40-second take, keep the best stretch inside the 15-second ceiling, and download — same format, same codec, same detail. Two Etsy-specific notes. First, don't spend time on a voiceover or music: Etsy deletes the audio track on their end regardless. Second, if you shot 4K/60 and the file flirts with 100MB, the math above means trimming a couple of seconds shorter is also what pulls the size comfortably under — one move, both caps.
eBay: under a minute, and specifically H.264
eBay's page doesn't just cap the length — it names the codec: MP4 as "MPEG-4 Part 10 or Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 AVC)", which is H.264. That's the same trap our post on iPhone HEVC footage that won't open on Windows walks through: recent iPhones record HEVC by default, and an HEVC file doesn't become H.264 by wearing an .mp4 or .mov extension. The order that works: trim to under a minute first — losslessly, so the re-encode that follows chews on 40 seconds instead of five minutes — then run Convert to MP4, which NearVid does browser-natively via WebCodecs where the browser supports H.264+AAC encoding (feature-detected; the card only appears when it will actually work). The output is exactly what eBay's spec asks for: H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4. Then upload once and wait — eBay reviews videos before they go live, normally within 48 hours, so this is not a loop you want to iterate by trial and error.
Shopify: the roomy one — and the one that takes WebM
Shopify's limits are generous enough that a typical product clip needs nothing at all. Where NearVid earns its place is the edges. A long demo pushing ten minutes or a gigabyte gets a lossless trim down to the segment that sells. And because Shopify explicitly accepts .webm uploads and converts everything to MP4/HLS on its own servers, NearVid's Convert to WebM path — which runs on the built-in ffmpeg.wasm engine, on any browser, no WebCodecs required — is a legitimate route for footage that needs a re-encode on a browser where the MP4 card doesn't appear. One more marketplace-wide trick that has nothing to do with the video slot: every listing leans on photos, and NearVid's frame extraction pulls a PNG or JPG out of any moment of the clip at the video's native resolution — a real way to turn the best frame of a product video into an extra listing photo, with our guide to picking a good still covering how to choose the timestamp.
What NearVid doesn't do here
Same honesty as always. NearVid doesn't know Etsy's, eBay's, or Shopify's rules — there's no "make this Etsy-legal" button, and the 15-second ceiling is yours to hit with the trim handles. It doesn't resize or crop: a 4K clip stays 4K through Trim, Convert to WebM, and Convert to MP4 alike, so if eBay's 1080p upload ceiling is what's in your way, the fix is your camera's settings before you shoot, not this tool after. It doesn't merge takes into one clip, doesn't add music or captions, and doesn't strip audio — Etsy does that on their own servers. The Convert to MP4 card only appears where the browser's WebCodecs H.264+AAC support is detected. And everything runs in your browser tab, on your device: the only upload that ever happens is the finished file, to the marketplace, by you.
The honest summary
Per each platform's own documentation: an Etsy listing video runs at most 15 seconds, loses its audio on upload, and stays under 100MB; an eBay listing video is one minute or less, up to 150MB, in H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) MP4 or .mov at up to 1080p, reviewed before it appears; a Shopify product video gets 10 minutes, 1GB, and up to 4K, with .webm accepted and everything re-served as MP4/HLS. Unlike every other cap this series has covered, the binding number here is seconds, not megabytes — bytes only bite when 4K/60 footage (about 400MB per minute, per the iPhone's own settings screen) meets a long window. Which is why the right first move is the same lossless trim this series keeps landing on: keep the seconds that sell, at untouched quality, on your own device — and only re-encode when a platform's codec list, not its size limit, demands it.